FILE--The twin towers of the World Trade Center rise above the New York skyline in this June 23, 1999 file photo. Both buildings were destroyed on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 after two airliners were hijacked by terrorists and crashed into them. This photo is for use as desired with stories about the terrorist attack. (AP Photo/File, Ed Bailey) less

FILE--The twin towers of the World Trade Center rise above the New York skyline in this June 23, 1999 file photo. Both buildings were destroyed on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 after two airliners were hijacked by ... more

Photo: ED BAILEY

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The San Francisco skyline looking towards Oakland with the Bay Bridge in the background. Chronicle Photo: Michael Macor

The San Francisco skyline looking towards Oakland with the Bay Bridge in the background. Chronicle Photo: Michael Macor

Photo: MICHAEL MACOR

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Scale of destruction / New York's lost office space is bigger than S.F. Financial District

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Imagine that San Francisco's Financial District -- the landmark towers,

the office canyons on Montgomery and California streets, all four Embarcadero Center buildings -- had been put out of commission overnight.

That, from an office space point of view, is what happened in New York last week when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center.

Incredibly, lower Manhattan's total commercial real estate void in square feet is greater than the amount of office space in San Francisco's marquee business district, that photogenic quadrant bordered by Market Street, Kearny Street, Broadway and the Embarcadero.

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About 11 million square feet across the street -- including much of the World Financial Center, home to Merrill Lynch and American Express -- is shut down because of facade and window damage and the massive recovery effort under way at the bombing site.

And about 5 million square feet has not yet been inspected by city officials and could stay empty for months or years if structural damage is found.

That downed space tops the 25 million square-foot office total in San Francisco's northern Financial District, although the citywide office total is about 60 million square feet.

"I wouldn't even want to consider that," said a shaken Skip Whitney of the Whitney Cressman brokerage in San Francisco.

Besides the wrenching human toll, the heavy damage in New York is causing a huge relocation operation.

Yesterday, Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc. said that it would take over the Sheraton Manhattan Hotel in Midtown. The securities firm, which lost 1.1 million square feet in the Sept. 11 attack, has rented 650 rooms to house about 1,500 investment bankers and researchers.

Bank of New York Co. has leased 600,000 square feet in an undisclosed Manhattan location. The company had about 3,500 employees in Wall Street buildings that are now closed.

Other companies are employing more resourceful measures. Bankers are renting from law firms, and some high-flying finance types have taken up working quarters in their bosses' apartments, according to Bloomberg News.

Many firms are relocating workers to New Jersey, which had experienced a real estate boom in the past year as Manhattan vacancy rates fell to some of the tightest levels in the nation.

"We've moved people to offices in Hackensack and Somerset," N.J., said Elizabeth McNichols, spokeswoman for Sun Microsystems of Palo Alto, which had 346 workers on the 25th and 26th floors of the World Trade Center's South Tower. All of Sun's workers are safe.

Bank of America, which had its global treasury services and some investment bankers on floors 9, 10, 11 and 81 in the North Tower, moved its displaced employees to other sites in New York and in Secaucus, N.J., spokeswoman Jennifer Tice said.

As of yesterday, three of the bank's 400 former Trade Center workers were still missing, Tice said.

For many companies, the biggest question after life returns to normal will be whether they want to stay in New York.

"Most of the people we've spoken to are looking in Manhattan," said Ray O'Keefe, regional managing director for the Northeast for Grubb & Ellis. "They want to be as close as possible to the human resources and talent -- media, advertising, legal, accounting, real estate services and all the other professional services."

Sun's McNichols agreed.

"There's no question we will return to New York," she said. But nobody knows when.

Most of the 25 million square feet of office space that was available in Manhattan before the terror attack was classified as Class B and C space, which means small offices and warehouses. That is not the kind of address Morgan Stanley, for instance, is used to.

"The World Trade Center had huge floorplates, and that stuff is hard to find," Grubb & Ellis' Justin Stein said. "At some point, we expect large portions of downtown to be occupiable again, but that depends on the cleanup."

The 53-story One Liberty Plaza building, which was briefly considered to be on the verge of collapse, has now been deemed structurally sound. That will put 2.1 million square feet of prime space back on the market.

For many, however, the real estate search is still a trivial pursuit in the face of the disaster.

"You go home and someone is missing from your church, school or community," Insignia's Powers said. "The impact here is so much more on the human side than on the physical side, notwithstanding that two huge buildings are gone."

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TALE OF THE TAPE

The amount of destroyed or unoccupiable office space in New York after the World Trade Center terror attacks is greater than the total space in San Francisco's Financial District.